Person of Note - Poster on Photoshop

This is the ink drawing I have done which will be the main image of Ella Fitzgerald in the final A2 poster. There are a few smudges where I was too optimistic with how dry the ink was which I will need to Photoshop out. 

I removed the background and fill of her dress so that only her face was filled in and the outlines were left. I used my drawings from the postcard of Norman Granz and scanned them in at a higher resolution so that they could be used here. I played around with compositions and settled on this which I quite like. However, this is solely based on jazz and I want to incorporate the women I have drawn. 

I did quite  a lot of playing around with this to try and balance everything and make each figure as clear as possible. I found it difficult to work out what size everything should be but realised that this doesn't need to be realistic as it is a collage of people rather than a scene of what something would actually look like. 

Markmaking edits

I scanned in my markmaking pages and edited one of them which was going to be the fill for Ella's dress. I inverted the colours as I wanted it to be mainly black. I then imported it and adjusted appropriately to fit the shape it needed to fill. The dashes were meant to look like sparkles on her dress and I'm not sure this has been successful. However, I like how it looks like confetti or ticker-tape falling on the people below because it makes them look like they are having a celebration.

Some brief colour experimentation - I want to work with a yellow/gold colour for the crown so I chose its complimentary, purple, to fill the background. I need to experiment with this further as I am not happy with the contrast between the colour and the black and white at the bottom. 

The image I worked from for this image of Ella had a ring on her finger. Although this is her right hand so it is not her wedding ring finger, I wanted to move it so there was no confusion. She was an inspiration to some women purely because she wasn't ruled by a man and she divorced two men so I thought it was appropriate for it to be clear that she isn't married here. 

Ring moved to middle finger

I used the clone tool to heal the area the ring had been removed from and I think this turned out pretty seamless. I can definitely tell that my Photoshop skills are improving with practice.